The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

Once he stopped and stared back, and in the pause which followed one could distinctly hear a faint but rapidly increasing drumming sound following his trail up the ditch. And least of all beasts had that cat delusions. He turned and galloped on. The keeper's dog was of an independent turn of mind. He had quietly run that cat's trail, forgetting that, in the long-run, dogs are not fitted to maneuver independently, and may suffer if they do so. You see him flying up the trail, square nose to ground, tracking really very cleverly indeed, and with a fine amount of what huntsmen call "drive."

Ho had overtaken Pharaoh before the hunted one could reach the wood. He realized it as he took the last bend in the ditch, when he saw a yellow streak rise under his nose, and bound, with all four legs stuck out quite straight, and claws spread abroad, like a rubber ball out of his path, avoiding his clumsy, murderous snap by an inch, and then felt it rebound right on to his back.

The next few seconds were quite crowded, and that dog had the time of his life.

Even an ordinary domestic "puss" can make wonderful havoc of a dog's back when once it gets there; and stays, as it does, like a burr, and this one could go a bit better than most; and when that dog at last got the cat's "leave to go," he went rather sooner than at once, proclaiming his misery aloud to all the world, so that his master, coming at that moment out of the back-door of the cottage, heard him afar off, and swore.

As for the cat, he turned about, all bristling, and went too. He went straight up to, and through, the wood, disturbing in clouds the starlings, who had just come in to roost in the rhododendrons, so that they rose with a rushing of wings like the voice of a thunder-shower on forest leaves, and incidentally drenched the cat with a deluge of raindrops collected in the leaves as he raced through underneath. A lesser beast, it may be noted, would have climbed a tree, but Hawkley, I think, had convinced his cat of that folly when a man might be following up behind.

Straight through the wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond. That showed strategy. The furze was a maze of a million spikes, and branches, and twisted, gnarled stems tough as wire-rope; a wonderful place, all honeycombed with rabbit-runs; a world unto itself.

The cat moved on quickly into the heart of the furze, pausing every few strides to listen and glare round. Several times he sniffed the sickly grass and the carpet of dead spikes.

Once or twice something moved ahead; a branch was shaking as he came up, a blade of grass slowly righting itself, as if something that had been sitting upon it had but just stolen away. All round were hints of life, but no life was visible. It was as if the cat were moving through an army of ghosts.

Then, in a flash, without any kind of hint or warning to prepare one for the unnerving contrast of the change, was war—raw, red war.

There had come up a rabbit-run—a regular rabbit-turnpike—a creature. It was strikingly colored, that creature, and big—nearly three feet long, to be exact; but it looked much bigger in the ghostly twilight—and yet till it was actually upon him he, even he, had failed to see it.